Shipping is a treasure trove of ecommerce order fulfilment as customers can be won over with fast, affordable shipping. In fact, 90% of customers consider shipping options a vital factor in their shopping experience.

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As per the statistics, it’s clear that makes meeting their expectations is nothing less than crucial in order to sustain and grow in the ecommerce landscape.

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Unfortunately, ecommerce brands face many challenges with shipping. It generally means high shipping costs, pressure to ship faster, growing support queries, and increasing complexity in the entire ecommerce logistics.

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Optimising shipping isn't easy, but with innovative strategies and planning, ecommerce brands can attain long-term success.

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In this blog, you will learn what is ecommerce shipping, what are the challenges of shipping that ecommerce brands face and how to solve them.

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What is ecommerce shipping?

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Ecommerce shipping refers to all the services that are required to transport online orders from a fulfilment warehouse to the customer's doorstep.

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Ecommerce shipping is a challenging aspect for most online businesses. So, it's essential for ecommerce brands to create an effective shipping strategy that ensures seamless order fulfilment, keeps a check on costs, and delights their customers.

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What are the issues with ecommerce shipping and how to solve them?

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Here are the 6 ecommerce shipping issues with the best strategies to solve them:

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1. Inability to offer fast shipping speed

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When it comes to expedited shipping, you’re not just competing with other ecommerce brands. You’re up against major marketplaces like Amazon that offer expedited shipping, including free 2-day delivery options.

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Solution: If you want to achieve lightning-fast shipping speed, you can:

• Split your inventory in multiple fulfilment centres across India to reduce transit times dramatically
• Introduce automation in order fulfilment like barcode scanners, conveyor belts, intelligent robots, and more
• Follow a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to streamline routine operations and achieve desired shipping speed
• Stick to SLA-driven shipping if you’re selling on marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, and more
• Use expedited courier services like 2 day shipping
• Optimise delivery routes by selecting the fastest, most cost-effective routes possible

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Eshopbox’s tech-enabled fulfilment enables you to store your inventory closer to your customers across India, cuts down picking and packing time and reduces manual errors. As a result, your orders are shipped faster than ever.

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2. Struggle with high shipping costs

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Shipping costs form one of the most substantial expenses for ecommerce businesses. Moreover, the faster shipping options are expensive.

According to research, high shipping costs constitute 58% of all shopping cart abandonment—demonstrating that shipping costs not only impact the customer experience but also determine the profit margins for your business.

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Solution: If you want to reduce shipping costs, you can:

• Reduce the shipping distance by splitting your inventory in multiple fulfilment centres spread across India
• Get shipping quotes from multiple courier companies and choose the best service at a reasonable price
• Reduce the weight of the package by avoiding any packaging mistake
• Find discounted supplies like boxes, dunnage, bubble wrap, air-fill, and poly mailers
• Opt for third-party shipping insurance to protect you against shipping exceptions of lost or damaged orders during transit
• Use prepaid shipping services to get better deals
• Select the most appropriate mode of transportation based on their pricing

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Eshopbox drives down shipping costs by 45% with its distributed network of fulfilment centres, strong shipping network, negotiated shipping rates, and discounted fulfilment supplies.

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3. Not able to handle high order volume

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In ecommerce, the order volume doesn't stay constant all year long. Your inventory levels fluctuate based on seasons, flash sales, festive sales, discounts, and more. If you don’t plan accordingly, you can run into the following situations:

• Shortage of storage space when receiving new batches of inventory
• Excess storage space, if you leased a warehouse expecting growth in sales volume which did not come to fruition
• Inadequate manpower strength when order volumes are high
• Excess manpower when order volumes are diminishing

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Solution: If you want to handle fluctuating order volume, you can:

• Leverage a flexible infrastructure to manage the fluctuating order volume by outsourcing ecommerce fulfilment to a 3PL like Eshopbox
• Allocate your resources according to your current order volume
• Ramp up your fulfilment capabilities for sales and other promotional activities
• Opt for on-demand warehousing and logistics during peak seasons

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4. Less or no control over last-mile delivery

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Once your orders are in transit, you have less or no control over the shipping carrier. Therefore, you cannot guarantee on-time delivery to your customers. On top of that, you also lose the visibility of your orders when they are shipped.

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Solution: If you want to master last-mile delivery, you can:

• Ensure complete visibility of order delivery when orders are in transit
• Partner up with Eshopbox to empower you and your customer to track orders in real-time on a dedicated tracking page and receive an estimated delivery date
• Manage shipping exceptions with Eshopbox’s automated workflows

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5. How and when to leverage data

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Effectively managing fulfilment processes involves a great deal of data, analytics, and reporting. Unfortunately, many ecommerce brands struggle with accurate data logging and making sense of too much information. Moreover, data is not enough. You need data-driven reports and insights to steer your ecommerce business in the right direction and make informed decisions.

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Solution: If you want to leverage data, you can partner up with Eshopbox:

• Get access to the actionable dashboard, analytics, periodic reports and key metrics to gain visibility into your performance
• Get zone-based sales data to plan inventory splitting
• Get sales performance reports to find out your sales velocity, return rate and many more ecommerce metrics

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6. Poor inventory management

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Ensuring an uninterrupted order fulfilment doesn’t come easy for most ecommerce brands. Especially, when inventory levels fluctuate with every transaction. Most of the time, brands don’t have sufficient information regarding— which products are running low, when to reorder and how to avoid overselling.

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Solution: If you want to manage inventory and forecast demand, you can:

• Track inventory and quantity on hand across multiple fulfilment locations in real-time with Eshopbox’s actionable dashboard
• Get full visibility of your inventory levels across all sales channels through a unified view to prevent interruptions in fulfilment and delays.
• Get proactive inventory replenishment reminders to restock inventory to prevent Out-of-Stock (OOS)
• With real-time inventory updating, Eshopbox syncs your inventory across all sales channels every 5 minutes, enabling you to relay accurate inventory levels in real-time and avoid overselling

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Wrapping up

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With the ecommerce sector becoming increasingly competitive, online brands must meet customer expectations and outdo their competitors. While ecommerce brands face many ecommerce shipping challenges, technology, infrastructure, automation, and strategic steps can help brands overcome these issues. However, some brands may benefit more from outsourcing their ecommerce fulfilment to a 3PL provider like Eshopbox so that shipping and fulfilment are tackled behind the scenes—enabling ecommerce brands to grow indefinitely.